But then, what do these women want of me, what do they expect, do they really not understand the efforts I make, just to keep going, to keep the peace? And yet … if I’m left alone, if Gilda dies, what will I be able to do with myself when I’ve become master of nothing?

‘La babbuina’

Part of the collection La babbuina e altre storie (Mondadori, 1967).

Corrado Alvaro

1895–1956

Alvaro is the only writer in this volume from Calabria, one of the poorest regions of Italy, and though he moved away from it as a young man – sent away to a Jesuit school outside Rome, serving in the army, studying and working in Milan, and eventually settling in Rome – that arid, insular landscape, the southern ‘toe’ of the Italian peninsula from which so many migrated, inspired him all his life. A transitional figure who fused Realism with Modernist and lyrical elements, he wrote poetry as well as prose. He was keenly attuned to tensions between rural and urban society, between the world of manners and the irrational realm. He started publishing stories in La Stampa in 1929, and followed up, a year later, with a powerful collection called Gente in Aspromonte (published in English under the title Revolt in Aspromonte). His novel Quasi una vita (Almost a Life) received the Strega Prize in 1951, but he remains finest in his stories, which are ambiguous, ardent, psychologically driven and morally charged. He was known for labouring intensely over drafts; the year before he died, he organized his short fiction in a definitive volume called Settantacinque racconti (Seventy-five Stories). A fierce and open opponent of Mussolini, he was among the intellectuals who signed Benedetto Croce’s Anti-Fascist Manifesto in 1925, and he hid under a false name in Abruzzo in 1943 after the regime fell. Alvaro also worked as a journalist throughout his life – he was an editor at the anti-Fascist newspaper Il Mondo – and was at one point dispatched to the Soviet Union, where he learned enough Russian to translate Tolstoy into Italian. In the last two months of his life he befriended Campo, who was at his side when he died. This story, a hybrid of conventional plot, intrigue and interior rumination, moves rapidly and unpredictably, its slippery structure mirroring the rootless gypsy at its centre. A recurrent female figure in Alvaro’s work, she symbolizes both desperation and freedom, and defies fixed notions of identity.

Barefoot

Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

At times, as soon as I’ve closed the door to my house, I hear the phone ringing in my room. I go down a few steps, slowly, listening all the while to a sound that gradually sounds more like a voice that’s calling. I climb back up the steps, open the door and go into my room. When I pick up the receiver, poof, the call vanishes, and in the Bakelite tube I hear that ‘crac’, like a knot being tied that no one can undo.